S.T.A.G.S.

by M A Bennett

  The three girls were pretty similar in appearance, all blonde-haired and blue-eyed. We’d been studying Homer in Greek that term and they reminded me of the Sirens: beautiful mermaids who looked gorgeous but would actually lure sailors to their deaths. Their names were Esme, Charlotte and Lara. They were all pretty, and slim, and they managed to make the strange ecclesiastical uniform look like something from the catwalks of Milan. Charlotte was some distant cousin of Henry’s, Esme was minor royalty, and Lara, seemingly as British as the rest of them, was from a Russian family with an Oligarch-level fortune. They all had that hair that lifts at the hairline and falls over one eye, and they constantly flicked it from one side to the other as they talked. My hair (bobbed, black, heavy fringe) doesn’t behave like that, but all the other girls at STAGS (including, tragically, my roommate Jesus) tried to copy their style. To begin with I made the mistake of mixing the Medieval girls up, dismissing them as all the same. If Dad was here to play our film game we’d be saying Heathers or Mean Girls, but those movies don’t really do justice to the evil that lived behind the white smiles. They weren’t dumb blondes, those girls, they were highly intelligent; you underestimated them at your peril, and that’s exactly what I did.

  All of the Medievals were incredibly rich – Henry’s family had been coming here for centuries, and the school theatre was even called the De Warlencourt Playhouse. Lara’s family, it was rumoured, paid for the pool. This made them behave as if they owned the place; because they kind of did.

  There were only ever six Medievals, three boys and three girls from Six Two – the second year of sixth form. But beyond this hard core there were a whole bunch of hangers-on who idolised them, and did exactly what they wanted in the hope that in Six Two they would become Medievals themselves. Every year, six Medievals leave and a new pack is forged, so there are plenty of wannabes hanging around. Jesus is definitely one – she would die to be a Medieval.

  All of the Medievals were OK individually; I was in a lot of their classes and they could be quite human. But when they were in a pack, like hounds, that’s when you wanted to be invisible, like Aidan’s stag. They mostly left me alone; occasionally the three girls would mimic my accent and snigger behind their hands once I’d walked past them in the quad. I’d feel like there was a cold stone of unhappiness lodged just below my ribs, and the feeling wouldn’t subside until I’d gotten out of their eyeline. But I had it easy. Some people seemed to be in their crosshairs all the time. People like Shafeen.

  The Medievals called Shafeen the Punjabi Playboy. He was tall and quiet, with a handsome, serious face and unreadable dark eyes. The nickname they had given him was wilfully inaccurate. For one thing, he was not from the Punjab at all. For another, he was painfully shy around girls, quite the opposite of a playboy. But that, of course, was what they found so funny. From the Medievals’ perspective, if a nickname sounded good, and it made them laugh, it stuck. Shafeen was one of the only people who talked to me; we’d chosen the same subjects for A level, and we were in the top set, so we talked about our classes a bit. You could say he was the nearest thing I had to a friend that first term, but as he was in Honorius and I was in Lightfoot, he wasn’t much comfort. I didn’t know much about Shafeen at the beginning – of course, I know him now. (Guilt is quite a bond, I’ve discovered, and since Shafeen is a murderer too, we now have a very particular connection.) People said Shafeen was some sort of prince back in India, so you might have thought the Medievals would welcome him into their group. But they teased him mercilessly, and, as I found out later, their dislike of Shafeen came from some old quarrel that took place at STAGS about a million years ago, between Shafeen’s father and Henry’s. Shafeen too had been at STAGS since he was eight. He’d been all the way through the prep bit and the main school to the sixth form, as his parents were in India. But although Shafeen knew all the rules, and even spoke like the Medievals did, he somehow managed to be an outsider too.

  I’ve asked myself many times why Shafeen accepted The Invitation when he knew what the Medievals thought about him. He can’t not have known what they thought about him; they made it so public. Even in lessons Shafeen wasn’t safe. I heard one exchange in history that made me a bit scared for him.

  We were in the Bede library, seated at our single desks in rows, with the weak autumn sun streaming through the stained-glass windows and brightening our black coats with multicoloured patches. We were studying the Crusades, a tussle between the Christians and the Muslims over the city of Jerusalem that started in 1095, when STAGS, unbelievably, was already four centuries old.

  ‘Who can tell me about the Battle of Hattin?’ asked Friar Skelton, our round and cheerful history professor. ‘Mr de Warlencourt, one of your family was actually there, wasn’t he?’

  Henry smiled; the Medievals always took the trouble to be charming to the Friars. ‘Yes, he was, Friar. Conrad de Warlencourt.’

  Friar Skelton tossed a piece of chalk in one hand. ‘Perhaps you could give us the family perspective.’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Henry. He sat a little straighter in his chair and I couldn’t help thinking that in the black Tudor coat, with the sun striking his blond hair, he looked a bit like a young Crusader himself. (‘Henry V,’ said Dad in my head, ‘or maybe Kingdom of Heaven.’) ‘The forces of Guy of Lusignan met the Sultan Saladin’s forces at Hattin. The Christian army was already starving, and dying of thirst. Desperate for water, they were lured to Lake Tiberius, where they found their way blocked by the sultan’s army. It was a trap.’

  I could see, looking at the shuttered expression on his face, that it hurt him. Crazily, Henry de Warlencourt still minded what had happened to his ancestor all those years ago.

  Friar Skelton hadn’t seen it. ‘Then what?’ he asked cheerily, chalk poised in mid-air.

  ‘They made a mess of us, Friar. The Crusader army was completely destroyed. The defeat led directly to the Third Crusade. The sultan took the True Cross and the city of Jerusalem too.’

  I registered that ‘us’. Henry really was taking this personally. ‘The survivors were captured, but Saladin didn’t want to be burdened with prisoners. His men begged to be allowed to kill the Christians. They were lining up to do it. With their sleeves already rolled up.’ He jabbed his pen viciously on his writing pad. ‘They only let my ancestor go on condition that he told Richard the Lionheart what had happened. And he did. It was a war crime, an atrocity.’ His voice rang out around the old library.

  Shafeen, sitting just beyond Henry, made a tiny sound. He shook his head and smiled ever so slightly. I was well placed to see it, because I was sitting just behind them all.

  Henry shot him a look, his eyes suddenly very blue. But Friar Skelton beamed; he loved a debate. ‘Got something to add, Mr Jadeja?’

  Shafeen looked up. He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, Hattin was an atrocity. But there were atrocities on both sides. The “Lionheart”, as you call him, murdered three thousand Muslim prisoners at Acre in cold blood. That wasn’t even in battle. They were unarmed, and tied up.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Friar Skelton, pointing his chalk at Shafeen. ‘More of the events at Acre later. But for now –’ he knocked on the blackboard, his gold signet ring making a sharp metallic sound – ‘we must return to Hattin. I would like you to write a short essay about, and form some understanding of, how the topography of the area contributed to the Crusaders’ rout. And please watch your punctuation, or I will be obliged to remind you, once again, that the sentence “Hannibal waged war, with elephants” does not convey the same meaning as the sentence “Hannibal waged war with elephants.” He wrote both examples on the blackboard (there were no whiteboards at STAGS), making a huge deal of chalking in the comma. ‘The former means that elephants were his war machines. The latter means that a great Carthaginian general was fighting a bunch of big-eared mastodons.’ Normally we might have laughed – we all liked Friar Skelton – but today the atmosphere was too strained.

  Friar Skelton turned away to
rub his sentences off the board and replace them with a drawing of the horns of Hattin. Cookson saw his opportunity and leaned forward in his chair towards Shafeen. ‘I suppose one of your ancestors was at Hattin too, eh, Punjabi?’ he said out of the side of his mouth. ‘On the camel-jockey side?’

  Now, I knew nothing about Shafeen’s religion, if he even had one, but what Cookson had done was to look at the colour of Shafeen’s skin and place him firmly with Saladin and the ‘infidels’. The message was clear: the Christian white boys against the Muslim brown.

  Shafeen did not look at Cookson. He was doodling a black Crusader cross on his pad of lined paper, filling it in so firmly that his knuckles paled. I thought, irrelevantly, how long his eyelashes were in the stained-glass sunlight. He said, quite clearly, ‘Perhaps you should pay as much attention in geography as you do in history. The Punjab is nowhere near Jerusalem. Neither is Rajasthan, which is where I’m actually from.’

  I was amazed. I had never heard Shafeen speak so many words at once, and with such confidence and command. He didn’t sound afraid of them at all.

  Friar Skelton turned back to the class and Cookson subsided into his seat. He’d just been owned, and I could see he didn’t like it. ‘Little shit,’ he hissed, under his breath.

  ‘Not little,’ murmured Piers. ‘He’s a long, brown shit.’

  ‘Like the ones you do after a vindaloo,’ agreed Cookson. ‘Long and brown and smelling of curry.’

  Piers sniggered. ‘We’ll settle him.’

  Cookson rocked back on his chair and stretched extravagantly. ‘Not long now,’ he agreed.

  There was such venom in their voices that I felt sorry for Shafeen. I tried to smile at him, but he didn’t catch my eye, staring instead, unseeing, at Friar Skelton’s chalk stickman rendering of long-dead Crusaders. I knew Shafeen had heard every word. I glanced at Henry. Blond head bent, he was painstakingly copying the diagram onto his pad. As ever, Henry had not taken part in any name-calling; he had done nothing but look at Shafeen, but his attack-dogs had sprung to his defence. Back then I still thought Henry the best of them, before I realised he was the worst.

  chapter three

  The Medievals were not straightforward racists; nothing so simple.

  I suppose you’d have to say that they were pretty even-handed really, in that they were quite happy to make fun of anything that didn’t fit. Their other major target, besides Shafeen, was ‘Carphone Chanel’.

  Like me, Chanel was new to STAGS that autumn term. I tried to make friends with her then, but she was too afraid of getting things wrong to make friends with the likes of me. She was too weak to ally herself to another outsider. Of course we are friends now: Nel, Shafeen and me, we three murderers. (I wonder what the collective name for murderers is. It can’t be a ‘murder’, since the crows took that one. Maybe a ‘conspiracy’.

  Nel has French-polished nails; ten perfect half-moons of white. She has caramel-coloured hair extensions and a perfect coffee-coloured tan. But underneath all the varnish she’s really nice. Her father dropped her off in a gold Rolls-Royce on her first day, and I found out later she was more bothered by that than I was by my dad’s ancient Mini. You see, we haven’t got money. But what I’ve learned from Nel is that when you’re at STAGS there’s only one thing worse than no money, and that’s the wrong kind of money. ‘My mum called me Chanel because she thought it had class,’ she told me once in her carefully trained voice, betraying no trace of her Cheshire origins. ‘She’s got no idea.’

  I knew what she meant by that. Class; it wasn’t on the syllabus at STAGS, because there was no need. It was something everyone else seemed to know, bred into their bones over hundreds of years. Where to go on holiday. What wellies to wear. How to tip your soup plate (not bowl) at dinner. None of this meant having things that were brand new. That was Chanel’s problem – she was brand new. Your shirt could have a frayed collar and buttons missing, as long as it came from the right maker in a little shop in London’s St James’s. Chanel could buy the same shirt, brand new, and still get it wrong. The Medievals called her a ‘try-hard’. But that didn’t stop her trying.

  Chanel’s father had made his money from his phone empire. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the Carphone Warehouse, but this didn’t matter to the Medievals any more than it mattered to them that the Punjabi Playboy wasn’t from the Punjab. They liked a bit of alliteration and Carphone went well with Chanel so it stuck, even though about two days into her time at STAGS Chanel began to call herself Nel. In actual fact Chanel’s father had developed a phone called the Saros 7S – sort of half-tablet, half-phone – and the whole world had bought one. Chanel possibly had more money than the Medievals, and had a palatial house in Cheshire with a pool and a cinema room, but because of where the money came from she was even more of an outsider. Because one of the major differences between STAGS and The Rest Of The World was that at STAGS there were no mobile phones.

  I don’t mean the school banned phones; it didn’t. The lower years used them as much as they were allowed, which was weekends and evenings. But in Six One and Six Two it became a weird point of honour to be phone-free. The Medievals were a six-person social-media backlash. YouTube, Snapchat and Instagram were looked down on as ‘Savage’. Selfies were Savage. Twitter was Savage. Facebook was Savage. Video games were Savage. For the Medievals, the tech revolution had sent evolution into reverse. They went round ostentatiously reading books. (Books were Medieval. Kindles were Savage.) The Internet was acceptable only in the library and computer room, to be used for research, not social media. (I heard that one of the Six One boys had been expelled for sneaking into the library at night and looking at porn. Poor thing; I guess he was desperate.) Very occasionally the Medievals would watch TV in the Six Two TV room, but when I passed they were always watching University Challenge, competing with each other to get the most answers.

  You’d think the kids would rebel, but they didn’t. Everyone was fine with the phone-free universe, and that was because the Medievals embraced it. Such was the power of their personalities, of their little cult. Everyone wanted to be like the Medievals. Even I, in the face of such social pressure, put my phone in a drawer and let it run out of charge. I had no wish to stand out more than I already did. With no contact with my old friends I was even more isolated. I spoke to my dad at weekends, on the landline that all my floor in Lightfoot had to share, but there was always a queue of Jesus and her friends, waiting and tutting, so I could never tell him half of what I wanted to say. Plus Dad was so excited about his documentary, and filming caves full of batshit in Chile, that I couldn’t tell him how unhappy I was. If I had, he would have come home. He loves me, you see.

  Apart from my dad, films were what I missed the most. I’d told myself that, even if I hated STAGS, I could just do the lessons and then shut myself away at night watching films on my phone. But I couldn’t even do that; that is, I could’ve done, but in some weird way I wanted to comply – I didn’t want anyone to think I was Savage.

  Of course, I knew in my heart that the phones thing was a massive pose, as was the whole ‘Medievals’ cult. But for Henry and his cronies it was just another way of demonstrating that they ruled the school, that they could bend everything to their will. They could have imposed anything they wanted – like having to hop on one leg on Wednesdays – and everyone would have followed them. But what was clever about the phone thing is that it went with the whole ethos of the school, the virtue of being different. Maybe that’s why the Friars kissed their arses so much. Instead of spending hours on screens, kids were reading, playing sport and doing drama and music and choir and stuff. Plus everyone wrote loads, using actual pens and paper. Texts were Savage; letters and notes were Medieval. At STAGS, handwritten notes flew around like autumn leaves, written in fountain pen with real ink, from folded notes on family-crested notepaper to creamy white invitations as thick as bathroom tiles. And that’s how this all began, with The Invitation.

  It was nearly ha
lf-term when the envelope came. Of course, being STAGS, they didn’t call it half-term, but Justitium. Jesus and I were in our room, getting ready for bed. And now we come to about the only time my roommate ever voluntarily talked to me. She was there when The Invitation slid silently under the door. I didn’t even notice, but she pounced on it excitedly, as if she had been waiting for it. I was brushing my hair at the time, and in the mirror I saw her read the front and droop. ‘It’s for you,’ she said, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. She reluctantly handed it over.

  It was completely square, a kind of thick ivory envelope folded over on four sides, and sealed – I kid you not – with a blob of wax, the red of our school stockings. On the wax was impressed a little pair of antlers. Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, I thought.

  Jesus hovered. I broke the seal, just like I’d seen in the movies. Inside was a thick square card. There were just three words on it, right in the middle of the creamy card, embossed in black ink. The letters were slightly shiny and raised to the touch.

  huntin’ shootin’ fishin’

  I looked up. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Turn it over,’ Jesus urged.

  I did. On the back, in neat italics, was printed:

  You are invited to spend Justitium

  at Longcross Hall, Cumberland.

  Coaches departing STAGS at 5 p.m. Friday.

  RSVP

  I turned the card over. ‘RSVP to who?’ I said. ‘There’s no name on it.’

  ‘That’s because everybody knows who sends them,’ Jesus said, with just a hint of her former scorn. ‘It’s from Henry.’